By Andrew Symonds
Due to the widespread use of the Internet, business models have changed over the years. Instead of solely operating in a brick and mortar setting, businesses have extended their mode of operation to the electronic setting. As with the traditional means of doing business, competition is fierce in the electronic world. Website owners’ battle over page rankings in order to have more people know about their presence.
This has lead to various techniques and practices, which increase page rankings and promote websites. Though there are many techniques which are legitimate, there is what is known as spamdexing. Spamdexing is basically used to refer to the practice of creating web pages to increase page rankings without paying attention to the content or relevance of the site. Spamdexing, though known by all concerned as unethical and dishonest, is quite rampant today.
In order to spamdex a page, website creators have come up with a lot of techniques to increase their page ranking. One popular way to spamdex is to stuff pages with keywords. This in itself is not a bad thing. In fact, SEOs which are totally legitimate use this technique. However, in spamdexing, the pages themselves do not contain useful information. They are stuffed with so many keywords that oftentimes, the pages do not even make sense at all.
Another way to spamdex is to stuff metatags. This is similar to keyword stuffing except that the keywords are found in the metatags. In spamdexing, keywords need not be related to the site’s content.
Having mirror websites is another form of spamdexing. Different websites with different URLs but have the same content in them fall under this category. Spamdexing also covers URL redirections. These are instances wherein the user is taken to a different URL without him having to click on anything.
In order to combat spamdex, search engines have come up with complicated algorithms to determine a site’s page rank. Google is the forerunner in this respect. With their “intelligent” spiders, sites which make use of spamdexing cannot fool them by keyword stuffing and metadata stuffing. In order to circumvent spamdexing techniques, they have added extra stipulations such as the number of links (both incoming and outgoing). Search engines also assign weights to incoming links as a further measure in combating spamdexing.
Knowing the different practices and techniques employed in spamdexing will definitely help in avoiding such practices.
Monday, November 27, 2006
Sunday, November 26, 2006
Stop Spam
By Andrew Symonds
Over a decade ago, “spam” connoted a certain food product usually enjoyed for breakfast. Today, in the internet age, when people say “spam”, the first thing that comes to mind is junk mail, or those unwanted emails that come into your mailbox offering you all sorts of things from breast and penis enlargements to loans, to bogus offers. Spam tends to take up your mailbox space and eat up your bandwidth resources that it has become such a major problem and annoyance. Recent moves have been made by responsible individuals to push an anti-spamming law to punish those that commit it. And as spamming application grows sophisticated by the minute, the more effort anti-spamming advocates have to exert to thwart this perennial problem.
Individually though, how does one stop spam from coming through the emails? Read on below for some of our suggestions.
Normally, all email clients have built in spam filters and other similar programs to detect and stop spam. But often, these are not enough to protect emails from receiving those annoying emails because as mentioned earlier, spam has become more developed over the years. Fortunately, there are several other third party spam blockers and spam filters which you can download for free and then install on your computers. Some even have additional features that can easily flag phishing scams, or those emails that contain fraudulent messages supposedly coming from big banks and financial companies and are targeting your finances.
What is the difference between spam filters and spam blockers?
Spam filters – Identifies and stops spam which carry certain key words and spam texts before it even reaches the mailbox. The problem though, with many spam filter system is that it may potentially also block emails coming from legitimate accounts. So make sure that these spam filters are installed properly. Filtering emails does not guarantee a stop to spam, but it can make your Internet activity fairly easier.
Spam blockers – Identifies and stops spam based on assigned blacklist containing the spammers’ email addresses or ISP. The downside of this is some spammers often change their ISP’s and addresses and this may not be assigned in the blacklist. You have to make sure to update your blacklist often.
Whether it’s a spam filter or spam blocker, or both, it is best to monitor and identify what you need versus the features these applications offers before you install your choice into your computer.
The other thing you can do to stop spam is to keep your email addresses separate and private. As most people carry a work email and a string of personal emails, use it for specific purposes only (e.g. work email addresses must strictly be for work only). Then divulge your email address only to persons you would like to exchange emails with. This move should help you stop spam by half. Use a personal free mail service when signing up online forums, groups or filling out online subscriptions. An email address specifically for these can be regarded as a “throwaway” or a “dummy email” which could serve as a buffer between your other more important emails.
Stopping spam takes a conscious effort. Those email address have to be safeguarded by the user (you) to protect you from many of the harm that Internet use poses.
Over a decade ago, “spam” connoted a certain food product usually enjoyed for breakfast. Today, in the internet age, when people say “spam”, the first thing that comes to mind is junk mail, or those unwanted emails that come into your mailbox offering you all sorts of things from breast and penis enlargements to loans, to bogus offers. Spam tends to take up your mailbox space and eat up your bandwidth resources that it has become such a major problem and annoyance. Recent moves have been made by responsible individuals to push an anti-spamming law to punish those that commit it. And as spamming application grows sophisticated by the minute, the more effort anti-spamming advocates have to exert to thwart this perennial problem.
Individually though, how does one stop spam from coming through the emails? Read on below for some of our suggestions.
Normally, all email clients have built in spam filters and other similar programs to detect and stop spam. But often, these are not enough to protect emails from receiving those annoying emails because as mentioned earlier, spam has become more developed over the years. Fortunately, there are several other third party spam blockers and spam filters which you can download for free and then install on your computers. Some even have additional features that can easily flag phishing scams, or those emails that contain fraudulent messages supposedly coming from big banks and financial companies and are targeting your finances.
What is the difference between spam filters and spam blockers?
Spam filters – Identifies and stops spam which carry certain key words and spam texts before it even reaches the mailbox. The problem though, with many spam filter system is that it may potentially also block emails coming from legitimate accounts. So make sure that these spam filters are installed properly. Filtering emails does not guarantee a stop to spam, but it can make your Internet activity fairly easier.
Spam blockers – Identifies and stops spam based on assigned blacklist containing the spammers’ email addresses or ISP. The downside of this is some spammers often change their ISP’s and addresses and this may not be assigned in the blacklist. You have to make sure to update your blacklist often.
Whether it’s a spam filter or spam blocker, or both, it is best to monitor and identify what you need versus the features these applications offers before you install your choice into your computer.
The other thing you can do to stop spam is to keep your email addresses separate and private. As most people carry a work email and a string of personal emails, use it for specific purposes only (e.g. work email addresses must strictly be for work only). Then divulge your email address only to persons you would like to exchange emails with. This move should help you stop spam by half. Use a personal free mail service when signing up online forums, groups or filling out online subscriptions. An email address specifically for these can be regarded as a “throwaway” or a “dummy email” which could serve as a buffer between your other more important emails.
Stopping spam takes a conscious effort. Those email address have to be safeguarded by the user (you) to protect you from many of the harm that Internet use poses.
Friday, November 24, 2006
The Use Of Spam Blockers
by Andrew Symonds
Today, it is not only viruses that need to be looked out for when a person using his personal computer to surf the web. With the fast evolution of technology also comes newfound nemesis such as Spyware and e-mail spam that can make life miserable for any Internet enthusiast. Thus, the demand for spam blockers has become rampant to help aid people from getting mischievous problems from the web. Much of the spam blocker programs are available on the web. There are sites that offer these spam blockers as free and packaged, but the real quality spam blocker software are the ones that compile more than just basic security and safety from computer users. Free spam blockers are usually offered from the giant search engines and leading security software developers for people who are completely less educated on how spam blocking can be done and the threats that they are exposed to from such inconvenient spamming, that ordinarily can come in many forms such as unsolicited e-mails and messages.
Spam blockers are usually offered to aid in e-mail security and verification for incoming messages. Ideally, most people would receive unknown e-mails from people who use spamming as one measure of enhancing so-called Internet marketing measures. While spam blocking may have a lot of things to consider, most of which are screening such e-mails, spam blocking is slowly gathering headway in helping protect people from such risks. There are a number of anti-spam blocking aids and spam filters that can answer the cry of victimized e-mails of people on the web. The development of such spam blocking software has been a welcome sigh of relief to clueless web exposed users. Getting tons of unknown e-mails, largely coming from online signups from sites that really have something more than just a pure signup in mind, are only some of the many sources of spamming.
The level of education that most people need to be able to understand the importance of spam blocking software has to be defined. Spam blockers are developed for a reason. These said spam blockers do the necessary initial screening for incoming e-mails or messages before they are allowed to be placed in the main inbox of most e-mail clients. Some would use online free spamming blockers, creating a little discomfort, but safe from discomforts of unwanted spam messages.
E-mail authentication or security checks are a good way to control spammed messages. It is only normal to expect receiving unsolicited e-mail messages coming from unknown sources, thus called spam in most cases. The content of these e-mail messages are usually special offers or too good to be true messages. The purpose of these unknown spammed e-mails is to solicit and gain hits and sign-ups from various sites that are aching for the needed attention to boost up their rankings. There are cases wherein spammed messages can be mistaken for authentic and sincere offers made by groups. Leaning on free-mail spam blockers alone is not enough and as stated earlier, the proper classification of spammed messages apart from authentic messages cannot be easily segregated. Either way, the owner of the e-mail box needs to manually classify if such message are really solicited or not, and with the help of free spam blockers, this can be controlled and contained to avoid getting conned out of scrupulous e-mail messages that find their way into their e-mail accounts.
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